essays | fiction | poetry | photography | art
I try bleaching the sun
using liquid soda crystals
but the sky turns yellow too
breathe and /hold
lungs and belly
moon balloon full
The weeks that followed exploded into a patriotic frenzy. Red, white, and blue dotted every neighborhood – even our own. Old Navy’s Fourth of July T-shirts reemerged for the last few weeks of September. Dad brought home a flag – taller than me – which I demanded be hung by the front door, just like…
the slow inflections of the wind
where rivers run like scars.
The moon hangs quietly
in the blackened air, halved and emptied, decaying since dusk
Here lie abandoned gyro crusts and Bundt cake crumbs.
Your fingers shine with olive oil grease
New York is often unfairly maligned for being unfeeling, but that’s just what we call uncontrollable things, which the city is. It tumbles on, transforming a million times over the course of a decade before remaining stagnant for far too long. Occasionally, shifts rise rapidly from seismic events. I’ve seen sudden pivots in the wake…
I dreamed of teeth
cracking teeth walnut
shells my cheek
hot on your back
waking
at midnight
to piss
on the sand dunes
and the sky overhead
like a badly
scratched frying pan.
In an ideal world
the washing machine
is a portal to clean linen
dishes lean back like sun
loungers by the sink
What springs from earth dissolves to earth again, and heaven-born things fly to their native seat.Marcus Aurelius ‘It’s about a third full,’ I say, clutching the mobile phone to my ear as I hang my head into the water tank, my voice bouncing off the metal sides and echoing back at me. ‘Does the pipe…
a chant begins
a loud doleful wail
smear my body in holy oil
adorn my head with your crown of thorns
It’s not that she wasn’t happy for her sister, far from it. Nadia only wished she could hold on to her for a little longer.
My soles are gelatinous, a mixture of blood, and yoke.
my father wanted to recreate the grapes
grow his own over our tiny backyard in the suburbs just outside the city
his vision was three separate plants,
arching and twisting their vines from our neighbor’s garage to ours
I swirl my eyes inside the paint
tears forming at the edges of me
January and the New Year are often dreaded in their insistence that we look back on what we have achieved, or what we meant to. This year, the looming of March feels the same, with its marking of the anniversary of the initial lockdown. It is easy to be hard on the progress you have…
Zones one to three have become a long-distance relationship.
Underground, Hades and his sardine dead
reach their eleventh hour
I sway and I spin, I smile. Sometimes even in perfect moments, you begin to feel the cold creep in.
My mother packed eggs sunny side up,
Spam slices golden-browned to perfection
tucked into my lunchbox.
and what does it mean
that her blood still sings
through the Old Quarter
of my veins?
The angel comes unbidden
on a Thursday morning,
knocking briskly, handing me
a pineapple and thirteen coral-tinted roses.
Through photography and sculpture, I question how the manipulation of behaviour and patterns dehumanises society.
will you give me gentle hand grips and the space I need
to feel sorry for myself?
To see a place, to see all of its contours and edges, its soft shape, you must leave for a while and look at it from the outside, return as someone different, someone older. I grew up on the Isle of Arran and left at seventeen, desperate to move to the city and become someone…
the diver submerged for so long
we presume her dead
shark food
scattershot of matter sinking deeper than cameras
Because of the pandemic, we didn’t have any Olympics this summer, so I decided to reproduce the Olympic coverage in July by printing (screen printing) over selected pictures from the Montreal Olympics of 1976
Spread out before you,
whipped and bright coloured,
dripping with sauces,
a world of unimagined flavours,
untranslatable.
Through countless retrievals, our memories of precious moments lose their ‘truth.’
Below the wall the soil
leeches contaminants
from an artificial hill rising
out of the field like a wart.
the small hours are all about compost—
wanderlust of priceless larvae
& transcendent effect of unremarkable habits
Around December, our grove
of banana plants grew heavy, saba begging:
to be picked, coated in brown sugar, wrapped
in lumpia wrapper, and fried in sugary oil.
‘As I listened to music and wrote poems, the space came alive, became my balcony garden, and gave new life to me.’
you said it’s tradition in Spain that as the clock
strikes twelve we must scoff a grape a chime
one at a time, but quickly as any left over become
unsalvageable, each one a rotten, failing month.
A version of this piece first appeared on Trampset In April, the reality of the pandemic fades into the background as my family deals with our own internal crisis. The house is in Kemsing, a southern English village in the Kent countryside. It is nestled on the slopes of the North Downs, a range of…
Just a spoonful satisfyingly sears on the way down, tickling all the microvilli on its magic school bus trip through the body. A taste so tangy, a flavor so fearless. Anything but diluted, the way I’d always told myself to be.
‘where reality and subconsciousness overlap and everything blends.’
We return to find
the magnolia still
bruising itself into blossom.
We physicians have never had a clearly defined mission. That mattered less when expectations were lower and we could do less. Now though, the reigning paradigm is grounded in basic science, excessively confident, inpatient-centric, and broadly focused on treatment of symptoms and signs, on diagnosis and therapy. The development of a new medical paradigm seems…
The train leans through
the Highland line, Inverness
to Fearn, wheat either side.
This carriage bows for you.
I’ve tried planting potatoes since you left,
but they never grow the way they did for you.
Lorighittas are a type of pasta made in one small village, Morgongiori, on a side of a mountain on the east of Sardinia. Only the women of this village, and only some of them, know how to make lorighittas. A lorighitta is effectively a woven pasta made from a dough of semolina and water. Each…
The water is so clear, the sunlight snakes across the rocks on the seabed, I can see the relaxed mottled skin of her arms below the ripples of surface, her arms leisurely open and close like silky breath.
